2015 04 17 Jan and I were very taken by Abbie Cornish in Bright Star: she played Fannie Brawn, Keats’ girl friend (the second girl he wrote his sonnet Bright Star “to”! (I wish I could buy pizza twice for the same $1.) I made a note to see more of Abbie Cornish: and we just watched a bit of The Girl: before bailing out. Wouldn’t have recognized her: The Girl is a big-assed blond; not a sympathetic Regency brunette. Abbie, The Girl, lost her son for driving drunk, she concludes that the difference between having and not having isn’t sobriety, or responsibility, or conformity, but money! So she takes cash from Mexicans but loses them in the river. One little girl isn’t so easy to pass on or to palm off: and I’ve bailed out of it again, and again. Dreary movie, one I blame for my irritation: nevertheless it prompts me to reflect something:
Columbus came to the new world, 1492: did he stop at a border? did he show a passport? Mayflower people landed at Plymouth Rock: did they show their fingerprints? or did they show the business end of their rifle?

The Rio Grand isn’t a Caribbean shore, isn’t the Atlantic … isn’t the Fifteenth Century … But still: what right do Americans have to ask anybody for a passport? anywhere? What right do we have to say that Texas is a “state”: or that Mexico is not?
Columbus and his people could have been killed on the Caribbean shore: and we might never have heard of him. Other people landed here and there, before and since, Erik the Red, Chinese … some got killed by locals and never said anything, some killed locals, then never came back … Whatever happened is whatever happened.

Why don’t Texans line the bank of the Rio Grand and have target practice with wetbacks trying to swim? There’s 300 million Americans, god known how many Mexicans … five or six billion people on earth; room for five billion or so fewer: wy don’t we just shoot the Mexicans? why don’t they shoot us? Wouldn’t we achieve a sustainable population fastest if we killed each other at borders (and not at borders)? No, not cops: not bureaucrats; people. all people. With sticks! and stones! and drowning, and our fingers in each others’ eyes! no bullshit about law or order: or green cards.

2015 06 07 Related: news today of some treasure hunter finding a wreck, attributing it to Captain Kidd, taking a big silver bar … UN calls a foul …
Uh … What does the UN have to do with it? Judges can sit at home and regulate what adventurers can do? Sure I might like a world of law and fairness, but where would we start? John Wayne can steal from the Apache but the Apache can’t steal from John Wayne? Shouldn’t the kleptocrats have to buy the anarchists rights before taxing the anarchist, putting the anarchist in jail, making him vote …